You flash a quick grin. "Oh, yeah, I want to see what it's like. Watch this!" You close your eyes and dive in.
There it is: a shimmering braided line of magic, faintly blue in your mind's eye.
It flows through the forest for miles, stretching back to its distant source and channeling through the earth like an underground river. At Camp Cedarcrest, it suddenly bursts wider, fueled by an inrush of power, and flows faster and stronger toward you. Then, at the edge of the Timeless Circle, it suddenly turns upward, climbing high to form a barrier around the clearing, like a circular waterfall in reverse.
And the river is full of time. You can feel it pulsing like a heartbeat, like the ticking of a clock, like the steady pound of waves on the shore. Regular and rhythmic and yet somehow ethereal as well.
You focus on one strand that leads from Camp Cedarcrest, and you wrap your mind around it, trying to isolate it from the others. Let's see what happens if I pull it apart, you think.
Snap!
The thread jerks free!
For a second, it spins and flaps in the ethereal space of magic, like a water sprinkler spinning on the end of a hose.
And then it is gone, fading away into the greater magic of the environment around it.
When you open your eyes, you feel oddly light-headed, as if you were outside yourself—or maybe before yourself? or after yourself? You have to hold onto your chair for a few seconds to keep from feeling like you're going to float away.
As the sensation passes and Josephine's face comes back into focus, you see that she is giving you a slight, superior smile. "That was not what you intended, was it? And yet, you see how exhilarating it can be."
That might not have been the word that you would use, but she's right in one thing: you definitely know how it feels now to be slightly unmoored from time.
"Other people move back and forth between the Timeless Circle and the rest of the world," Josephine continues, "as Lianna has no doubt told you. Marcus is even still in contact with his family—one of them is on the camp's board of directors—but they must come here, rather than Marcus traveling to them. The longer one spends here, within the magical barrier, the more connected to this place one becomes. As you will, I hope, discover."
Next